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You can spend hours a day pumping iron, doing your yoga, Tai Chi or Pilates and you can even hit that treadmill like a marathoner but none of that will give you the total body workout that a day out in the garden will supply. We needn’t even speak of the pride and the pleasure of having a nicely tended, productive and pretty yard which is the result of all that garden work. There is no denying gardening is great exercise. In case you are not convinced let us count the ways you can lose weight, gain muscle and gain a slimmer, healthier, more energetic you.
While there are those that take the easy way out and use a riding lawn mower to cut the grass that won’t burn the nearly 400 calories per hour when pushing a regular, old-fashioned mower, the one without the motor that goes clickety-clackety. But even if you go the motorized way that is still a workout to rival anything a drill Sargent can come up with at boot camp. This form of exercise, just pushing a lawn mower around, uses virtually every muscle you’ve got, quadriceps, laterals, biceps, triceps, hamstrings, calves and even pectorals. What the heck do you need a gym membership for if you’re lucky enough to have a lawn?
While most people dread weeding, the wise gardener uses this repetitive, mind-freeing activity to do some mediating, thinking or even daydreaming. You may not think that is exercise but it is. The brain needs to be tasked a bit, yes, to grow, to remain active and forestall aging but it also needs to relax. Stress kills, every doctor will tell you that but who can stress out watching birds splash in a fountain, butterflies twitter about and hearing the gentle buzzing of bees nearby? Couple that with the movements used to twist a dandelion out of the ground, pull that stubborn thistle up by the root and reach for and pry up stray, unwanted seedlings which uses pectorals, laterals, abdominals, biceps, triceps and wrist muscles and you’ve got yourself a harmonious mind and body activity. Looking at it that way, isn’t weeding a good thing?
Preparing a new garden bed where there currently is grass is an activity that can easily burn all the calories consumed from three entire cheesecakes. Hopefully you never eat even one entire cheesecake but still, those calories burned will get you down a size for sure and certain. Every single muscle will be used in the removal of the grass and the hauling of it away. Bending down repeatedly to pick up the clumps will do wonders for your gluteus maximus and you may wind up with a gluteus minimus instead. You’d like that, huh?
After the grass is removed there is the digging and tilling to remove rocks and roots. All those rocks (and if your yard is anything like mine you will have plenty and they get heavy) you will need all your muscles for that. Go gently or you will hurt yourself. Only carry as much as you are comfortable with even if it take twice as many trips to the rock burial place. After this there is adding whatever your soil needs to make it ready for planting. This can be adding compost, homemade or store bought, lime, bloodmeal or any number of other things and tilling it in.
If you want to save your back use a power tiller easily and readily available for purchase or rent at most good garden supply shops. While I don’t recommend tilling the soil very often as it tends to lose some of its structure other folks till every chance they get. Only you can decide if you want to invest in something like that. Either way, you still have plenty of work to do such as raking that freshly dug soil in order to plant and then there is the planting itself and mulching around the plants. After all that you deserve a whole cheesecake but do your waistline and arteries a favor and only take a slice.
Planting out your vegetable plants after the threat of frost has passed may seem like an easy task but even that uses muscles in your legs, back and arms. You have to carry them about, bend down to plant them, dig holes, and hammer in stakes. All that uses plenty of muscles and consequently, plenty of calories burned too.
Pruning trees and shrubs probably doesn’t sound like much of a workout but if you wield the pruner and lopper for any length of time you will most assuredly feel it in your arms, chest, shoulders and wrists. Then you have to use the back and arms to haul the garden debris to the compost pile. Even if you use a garden cart pulled by the lawn tractor you still have to toss the branches onto the compost pile which is a great twisting motion for eliminating love-handles and works the obliques and abdominals prodigiously well.
Picking produce may hardly seem like actual gardening put it is all part of the cycle. From seed to fruition you watched them grow and picking the first tomato and twisting it off the vine, bending down and harvesting all those yummy strawberries and pulling apples off the tree all require muscle action. And need we even speak of the good all these fruits do to a body on the inside once eaten?
Raking leaves is a nice way to spend an afternoon in the last days of autumn but it also provides ample opportunity to gently stretch your back and hamstrings, use your biceps and triceps and at the same time give your compost pile that much needed insulation only leaves can give it for the winter ahead.
Every winter we all impatiently anticipate that first warm day in spring to get out of the house and plunge into the garden head first but doing so without easing into it can result in aching backs, hurting knees, pulled hamstrings and painful muscles you didn’t even know you had. And we’re merely talking about “gentle” gardening. Turning over compost piles, double digging a new vegetable patch or a mass planting of anything from six foot high pine trees to a new perennial bed isn’t what is known as gentle gardening, by the way. That’s intensive gardening, probably called that for the mere fact you may end up in intensive care after a couple of days of it.
So, how exactly can one get the benefits of garden exercise without the pain? By being extremely careful, knowing your limitations, taking it slow and easy and by staying in shape throughout winter. Much easier said than done, yes, but still we must try or our gardens will suffer and so will we. Stretching before you go out into the yard and, this can not be stressed enough, stretching afterwards is the key. Yes, you are tired after all that work and you just want to plop down with some iced tea but a good stretching after a workout of even gentle gardening, will ease your muscles back into their original state to lessen any pain you may have and to get them ready for rest. This will go a long way to keeping your body from protesting after even vigorous garden exercise.
So now that you are armed with your growing season workout, stretch those muscles and get to it. We’ll see a much more toned, healthier and fun-loving gardener once winter sets back in.
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Author Bio Box: Glory Lennon
 Fro more garden fun, some amusing short stories and interesting novel excerpts visit http://www.helium.com/user/32782.
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